Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2013 February 10

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February 10

Alveolar lateral trill

Is the "alveolar lateral trill" (trilled l, similar to rolled r) possible to pronounce? At least for people who can pronounce the rolled r. Czech is Cyrillized (talk) 06:22, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Can you give a link to the sound you are talking about? μηδείς (talk) 21:44, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I've tried it. I sounded like a horse when I did it. Not sure any language uses such a phoneme, but anything is possible. It's telling there's no article about it. --Jayron32 04:38, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Tried and succeeded, or tried and just sounded like a horse and it didn't work? Due to how coronal trills work, wouldn't think it's possible. The only way I could see doing it, you'd have to hold the center (or more likely, one side) of the tongue stiff enough to keep it in contact with the alveolar ridge, while flexible enough for the remainder of the tip to trill - basically a simultaneous t/r, each half of the tongue doing one part. I don't think that's realistically possible. If it is, I'd suspect only a very small fraction of people have the muscle control to do it. Another potential possibility would be the cheek as the active articulator, trilling against the side of the tongue, I'd be even more surprised if that worked. Lsfreak (talk) 04:48, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

I don't know, maybe the horse sound was succeeding. I tried to trill the sides of my tongue the way I would trill the tips of my tongue while rolling an "r". I sounded like Mr. Ed objecting to something Wilbur did, or maybe a bit like a motorcycle. Not sure what language uses that sound, but it seems technically feasible to create that particular vibration on the tongue. --Jayron32 06:54, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

• There is the (voiced) alveolar lateral fricative /ɮ/. It is said like a voiced "thl" but with the tip of the tongue held on the alveolar ridge instead of the teeth. It's found in the Zulu language where its spelt "dl". I cannot for the life of me say it emphatically enough to produce a trill. It's probably one of those things only people with weird tongue-trick genes can do, if even they can. μηδείς (talk) 18:47, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Minerai

I'd be grateful for opinions on the best translation of "minerai de bœuf désossé surgelé (origine Roumanie)" . For the time being, I have put "frozen raw material of deboned beef (origin Romania)". This is in the article A la Table de Spanghero. Thanks. Itsmejudith (talk) 13:06, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

How about "frozen raw boneless beef (of Romanian origin)" ? --TammyMoet (talk) 14:35, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

More euphonic, but the translation needs to be dead literal, so the "minerai" has to be captured. Googling "minerai boeuf" I found these regulations [1]. I just asked at RDH whether they are the regulations that should have applied in the current scandal, but now I'm pretty sure they are not, for reasons I'll mention there. Anyway, the translation of the label is still relevant. The pdf document explains "minerai" as pieces of beef off-the-bone, which are intended to be minced. I'm now thinking "off-the-bone" instead of "deboned". If I can find EU regulations on minced meat they will be in all the languages and the translation problem will be solved. Itsmejudith (talk) 14:47, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I wonder if this is really a euphemism for pink slime. (The English euphemism "boneless lean beef trimmings" is just as obscure.) StuRat (talk) 17:18, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. Did you get "boneless lean beef trimmings" from a source, because if you did, I might be able to use it? I now know for sure what the word "minerai" means: pieces of meat off the bone. It is allowed to include fat, and it can include offal and collagen only in the proportions that would be in the animal naturally. It should not include the spinal cord or brain, and not mechanically recovered meat, which is not officially allowed in the EU. That's what it said on the packet and what should be in the packet. But packs labelled "minerai de boeuf" are not allowed to contain horsemeat in the first place, so what else was in there is anyone's guess. I feel we really need a native French speaker now, ideally one with extensive experience in the industrial food industry ;-) Itsmejudith (talk) 18:07, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I got that term from the first sentence in our article on it, which includes a ref (that, unfortunately, produces a "page not found" error). StuRat (talk) 04:24, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

• Pink slime is a dysphemism (see, for example). One need not seek euphemisms for ground beef. μηδείς (talk) 00:15, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

"Pink slime" is not normal ground beef, it's an extremely low-quality product formerly not considered suitable for human consumption (and still not considered so, by many). StuRat (talk) 04:27, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Pink slime is a dysmephism for MRM, which is not what materiau means. Nor does it mean ground beef. It means pieces of meat that are shipped to be ground/minced into ground/minced beef. I'm looking for the technical translation equivalent. I had hopes of a website of a Dutch meat packing company, with Dutch, French, English and German pages, but their translations are inconsistent. Itsmejudith (talk) 02:36, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

That sounds about right. It's not literally slime, but it's not really salable food grade ground beef either. μηδείς (talk) 04:39, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

More Googling threw up the exact translation: Manufacturing bulk packs. In Spanish, carne sin hueso en bloque. These translations were made by the UN and have legal force in the EU unless superseded by EU legislation, which I can't see that they are. http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/trade/agr/standard/meat/e/Bovine_2007_e.pdf is the document I found. Slime is definitely not the meaning intended. Itsmejudith (talk) 08:38, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Further on "minerai", a technical term that puzzles the French general public. Q&A on Liberation newspaper website "Odile. Pourriez-vous m’expliquer ce qu’est le «minerai»? L. N. Un produit qui sert à fabriquer des viandes hachées, il est donc préalablement désossé. Il en existe de différentes qualités et teneurs en gras." Itsmejudith (talk) 20:59, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Bad French intolerance stereotype

I sometimes hear rumors that Frenchmen (unlike many other nations) hate bad French of foreigners and usually arrogantly mock people who speak with mistakes or accent, even with the slight ones. Is it true or another sort of stereotypes?--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 15:32, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

My experience on the French WP has been good, though limited. They appreciate effort and good manners, like anyone. When i was there, they were always good, though the provincial French people were more communicative than the Parisians. IBE (talk) 16:03, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

One thing I find very odd about French Wikipedia is that when I was briefly in France several decades ago, vous usage was pretty strict for people you didn't have a meaningful social relationship with, but now on French Wikipedia the default seems to be universal tu... AnonMoos (talk) 09:18, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

(ec)That would come down to individuals. The average person probably appreciates the effort. References? Well, wikipedia has various articles on stereotyping. But this is a broad area. Have you tried searching in Google? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:06, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I don't think so. However, French culture has very little tolerance for grammatical mistakes or unusual word choices, even in spoken language. Native English speakers are used to hearing people from all over the world using their language in sometimes bizarre ways, and generally make a good effort to understand them. French people have less exposure to non-native speakers or speakers of other variants, and even local dialects or innovative words and idioms are very strongly discouraged. Instead of making an effort to understand an unusual expression, native French speakers may just say the very common sentence "Ce n'est pas du français", a sentence with which they used to be tortured themselves by their teachers. Or if they are more polite and make an attempt to accommodate the foreigner, they may not say that, but still not give the impression of even trying to understand what it is supposed to mean. In extreme cases, this may even happen just because the foreigner made the wrong choice out of de, en and à. (I wrote this in part so that someone in France can correct any misconceptions I may have.) Hans Adler 16:24, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Hans makes a good point: French speakers don't even seem to tolerate as much variation from native French speakers as exists in English. French, as a language, as much stricter enforcement of grammar rules, less synonyms, less ways to say things. It's a "tighter" language that English, and part of that may be due to Académie française, which has a generally prescriptivist view towards the French language; that is it sees its role as deciding what is, and is not, proper French. The nearest English equivalent to the Académie française is probably the Oxford English Dictionary, but that is a decidedly descriptivist documentation of English. That is, the OED sees its role as documenting how people are talking, not telling them how they should talk. The difference in attitude is rather pervasive in each culture. You can read about the different schools of thought in the articles Linguistic description and Linguistic prescription, each article of which covers the conflicts with the other school. --Jayron32 18:33, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

That is on a purely academical and literary level, and it has little to do with how the average French speaker would react in a situation described by the OP. But perhaps both your answers are deliberate attempts at examplificiation of the stereotyping? --Saddhiyama (talk) 19:12, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

See "Verlan".—Wavelength (talk) 19:04, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I don't think Verlan has anything to do with what the question is referring to, that's just a type of slang that French people sometimes use. Anyway, to add my personal experience, the only place anyone was ever rude about my incorrect French was in Paris, as you might expect from the stereotype...and it was only in the BNF...and it was only one person. No one else in France was ever rude. Actually, for the most part, they usually wanted to practice their English once they noticed my accent... Adam Bishop (talk) 20:36, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

This reminds me of another aspect of the question. I am under the impression that English speakers generally have a much stronger accent when speaking French than when speaking German. I think this may be in part a remnant of Norman French, the variant of French that was spoken in England over centuries and whose phonology gradually approached that of English. In other words, I think that to some extent one could say that an English accent in French is at least in part a local accent of French, where the location is somewhere in England. If that's true, and English speakers have a worse accent in French than in other languages, then that could explain the perception that the French are less tolerant to foreign accents than other people. Hans Adler 20:57, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Odd. I studied French and German in HS and was told by my French teachers (all foreign born) that Parisians would be rude if we didn't make a good attempt at French, and told by my German teachers (all American born) that as long as we said Gruess Gott! when we walked in a shop in the Catholic south we'd have no trouble at all. Was this to frighten us into improving our French? (I ended up going to Switzerland with the German club instead of Paris with the French club and fell back on my French when my German and their English was inadequate.) μηδείς (talk) 21:42, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Surprisingly, a friend and I ran into this attitude in Brussels. We were in a pub, and nobody would speak to us until I tried speaking with my limited French and my friend tried speaking in German, and all of a sudden, everybody spoke English and was friendly to us. RNealK (talk) 23:41, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Just being curious here: I have lived in Brussels now for almost 3 years, and I never had that type of experience...so could you tell me where the pub was? Especially the Belgians who speak French are normally not that difficult to handle; you'll get by with English almost anywhere. Try speaking French in Brugge, though.....Lectonar (talk) 13:46, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I can't remember, it was many years ago. RNealK (talk) 23:09, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

I think I can explain that. Think of what sometimes happens where local dialects are strongly discouraged.[2] People tend to react very strongly because they feel it's an attack on their identity. Now especially French speakers tend to be very proud of their language. Most in a still reasonable way, but some overdo it. [3]

Now we live in a world in which there is a strong pressure to use English. Take me for example. I'm a native German speaker living in a German-speaking country, but this, not the German Wikipedia, is my home wiki. Because it has greater impact. I also wrote my PhD thesis in English for the same reason.

A retired French colleague of mine once wrote an excellent text book, in French. None of the French publishers wanted to publish it. They said the market is too small for such a book in French. But they would be happy to create and publish a translation. This made him very angry. In the end he self-published it, at a time when this was still a huge effort, and it sold quite well. (Many years later he allowed Springer to translate the book.)

To speakers of languages other than English this feels like language colonialism. Most English-speaking tourists don't even make an effort to use any other language, contributing to the bad image. By trying to speak French or German, you show that you are not a language colonist, or at least not one of the bad ones. Hans Adler 00:15, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Quelle dommage', literally. Spanish I learned on the street and it is the only language that has earned me money. Back when I learned French and German they were the prestige languages, and I have indeed made use of them in the real world and the fields in which I am interested, but not for actual profit. Certainly not today. Japanese is already passé, and Mandarin and Hindi are up-and-coming. I have read various books by Springer Verlag, one of which is my favorite non-fiction book: Chaos and Fractals. It is in English. μηδείς (talk) 04:51, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

I thought it went without saying that if Springer translates a French book, then it translates to English. It doesn't matter that it's originally a German publisher. The point is: Big academic publishers everywhere publish science text almost exclusively in English, regardless of the local language. The situation with songs is similar. For large segments of German pop music, song texts in German would be highly unusual. Altogether, the role of English w.r.t. European languages is moving towards the role of standard English w.r.t. local dialects, or, more to the point, of Mandarin w.r.t. Chinese 'dialects'. Before English, German had this privileged role for a few decades, before that French had it for a long time, before that it was Latin for scholars and Provençalic for the nobility, and before that it was Latin for everyone.

I am happy with this, but a lot of people aren't. I think Germans tend to have less problems with this than French people, due to a feeling that we have forfeited any possible title to such a role for our language and didn't have it for long anyway. For French the opposite is true. Hans Adler 10:50, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Entirely OR, but my experience on a recent weekend in Paris was that any reputation the French might have for being intolerant or rude to foreigners is entirely misplaced. Everyone was friendly, seemed to appreciate my bad attempts at schoolboy French (20 years after being a schoolboy) and would happily either switch to English or (if their English was worse than my French) slow down or simplify their language. The only rudeness I experienced at any point was from a well-dressed woman who spoke perfect English but didn't understand why I wouldn't let her come through the barriers behind me onto the Metro without her own ticket. OpenToppedBus - Talk to the driver 12:09, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

To add to what Hans Adler said, I don't think that those French who expect people to use their language when they're in France are wrong. I think increasingly English-speakers display a sense of entitlement that people in other countries should know their language, and this is far worse than anything the French do. There is a difference between observing that many people around the world have learned English and viewing this as an acquired right. About the purported rudeness of the French towards tourists, here is a clip from "What Would You Do" that does a good job of debunking that myth. [4] It illustrates how the stereotype of the dumb American is in fact much more firmly anchored in the minds of Americans than in that of the French. 64.140.122.50 (talk) 09:03, 12 February 2013 (UTC)